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Nouveau Lights Up The GK106 Kepler

Phoronix: Nouveau Lights Up The GK106 Kepler

Red Hat's Ben Skeggs pushed out new code this morning into the Nouveau DRM driver repository. In addition to some video BIOS work and other changes, initial support for the NVIDIA GK106 GPU was pushed into this reverse-engineered open-source driver...

Nouveau still sucks on newer GPUs, so you'll have to use the NVIDIA driver... then it becomes irrelevant to this news. 8)

No, if KMS and displaying things on screen works, it means that it's already as good as Poulsbo drivers at this point. Which is usable. I'd also imagine that Nouveau is more stable even at this point, compared to the blob.

Depends what you want to do, but if you want to play games with nouveau I advise getting a 9800GTX (which works well with nouveau, see the recent benchmark)... Using a OSS driver on a recent GPU is almost never worth it.

As if someone was going to buy a $200+ graphics card and not be able to use it properly...

I have purchased 6800GT for 180€ and donated it to nouveau project. Now, you can use this card properly.

Originally Posted by Calinou

Depends what you want to do, but if you want to play games with nouveau I advise getting a 9800GTX (which works well with nouveau, see the recent benchmark)... Using a OSS driver on a recent GPU is almost never worth it.

Not 9800GTX, but 55nm 260sp216 or 275 or 285 GTX.
9800GTX is very inefficient.

The main problem with newer chips AFAIK is absent reclocking code, which restricts performance to idle speeds. Newer GPUs idle at much lower Hz, this is why the performance is abysmal for now.

So... if you think correctly, your best bet is to get pre7xxx radeon, use opensource driver, donate 10% to radeon developers and for another 10% buy low-entry nvidia 6xx model and donate it to nouveau developers.
This is absolutely best thing to do.

"I have purchased 6800GT for 180€ and donated it to nouveau project. Now, you can use this card properly."

A 9800GTX is 3 times faster and cheaper, and more recent... why use old GPUs? Also, it can be reclocked, like all other 9xxx NVIDIA GPUs, AFAIK.

"So... if you think correctly, your best bet is to get pre7xxx radeon, use opensource driver, donate 10% to radeon developers and for another 10% buy low-entry nvidia 6xx model and donate it to nouveau developers.
This is absolutely best thing to do."

AMD GPUs are only good for getting other GPUs. They overheat and they don't work. And, loldonating. *drops gamepad*

"I have purchased 6800GT for 180€ and donated it to nouveau project. Now, you can use this card properly."

A 9800GTX is 3 times faster and cheaper, and more recent... why use old GPUs? Also, it can be reclocked, like all other 9xxx NVIDIA GPUs, AFAIK.

Because 9800GTX was not produced in 2004.
And after 2009 I purchased 4670, then 9800GT, then 4770 and now GTX260.

Why the hell should I use 6800GT or 9800GTX?

9800GTX is 9800GT on steroids - hot, slow and huge. Even 5770 beats it. It belongs in antique.

Originally Posted by Calinou

"So... if you think correctly, your best bet is to get pre7xxx radeon, use opensource driver, donate 10% to radeon developers and for another 10% buy low-entry nvidia 6xx model and donate it to nouveau developers.
This is absolutely best thing to do."

AMD GPUs are only good for getting other GPUs. They overheat and they don't work.

AMD GPUs are usually better than Nvidia equivalents and more recent ones are much better, because they are universal GPUs. They are much less restricted to gaming.
Their only trouble is VLIW design, which requires good drivers to utilize the card fully.